“Sure!” Sarah swatted him on the shoulder. “What fun. You could play Gaston.”
“Gaston. Your suitor?”
Sarah nodded.
“Your protector.”
“You know my husband has connections,” she said. “I could certainly get you an audition.”
David had to laugh at himself. How many years ago had she forbade his acting? “Sure, Mom,” he said. “Or perhaps you could just get me great seats.”
“That’s a cinch,” she said, snapping her fingers.
“Forget it,” he said.
Concern flickered over Sarah’s face, and, for a moment, her eyes moved back and forth as if she were searching for textual evidence. “The tickets?”
“Everything.” Where had she gone? David wondered. And how far back did she go? He prayed that she would forget this conversation the way she had forgotten all the disappointment, the heartbreak. He wished he could forget that too.
He had thought this would be what she wanted. Or was giving his mother an overdose of pills more what he wanted? Maybe this was unbearable to him, not to her.
At that moment, Miriam appeared out of nowhere in the threshold.
“Oh!” David said. “You surprised us.”
His wife kicked at the floor, and her Ked squeaked against the bright tile. “Hazel had to go with the nurse somewhere,” she said. “I’m sorry to interrupt.” Miriam looked straight at David.
Through me, he thought. She sees, he thought, but what he knew was, she heard.
David got up from the bed and held his hand out to help Sarah. He took a deep breath. “Ready, Mom?” he asked brightly.
She nodded slowly. Afternoon light streamed in through the windows, illuminating the glossy eggshell white walls that crawled with rows of tiny fingerprints. Hers? David thought. Those of someone else who had been trapped in here before? The shiny magazine pictures were suffused with light, and it was impossible to make out from where he stood what was on their surfaces.
Outside the sky was turning to yellow and orange and blue-purple, and Sarah began to cry.
“What’s wrong, Sarah?” Miriam went toward her mother-in-law and knelt down before her.
David craned his head out of the room. “Nurse!” he called.
“It’s okay.” Miriam looked with a cold, meaningful stare toward her husband.
Orange light poured into the hallway, and David saw another woman alone, turned toward the wall, sobbing in a corner.
“Nurse!” he said in a growing panic.
A nurse walked toward him, registering his stunned expression. For a brief moment, her hard, medicinal look turned soft. “It’s the sundowning,” she said.
“What?” David asked.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “It’s just the time of day. The quality of light. At sundown, everyone seems to remember, even the worst ones.”
He looked over at Sarah being comforted by Miriam, and relief washed over him. Sarah crying was a familiar image, and for a brief moment he imagined that she was back to herself, that this awful scene had never passed between them. David remembered many things about his mother: her elegance, the way her silk robes flew out behind her as she raced around the house. The way she would hear only a few bars of a symphony and instantly be able to identify it. Brahms, Number 3, in F, she’d say, always pointing.
“I’m to be the star,” she said now. “Gigi! Everyone has always told me I have star quality.”
“I know, Mom,” David said from across the room. “You always have.”
“You did too,” she said. She looked up at her son. “You did, you know.”
David couldn’t look at his mother or Miriam.
“And what have you done with it?” she asked. “It’s all been wasted.”
Sarah stood up. Her dress crinkled loudly. “May I have this dance?” she asked, sniffling.
“No, Mom,” he said, looking straight ahead. “Sit down.”
“Come on,” Sarah said, dipping her head and curtsying.
David paused for a moment, and then walked toward his mother. He took her hand to help her stand.
“They asked me how I knew my true love was true. I of course replied, something here inside cannot be denied,” Sarah sang softly. She moved closer, placed her head on her son’s chest, and rocked slowly from side to side.
David stiffened and looked over at Miriam, still seated on the bed. Seeing his wife’s tearstained face in the early evening light somehow made him soften, his shoulders relaxing, his fingers and wrists loosening. Everything was serious. He put his hand at the small of his mother’s back and felt the hard, bent sequins scrape his palms.
“When your heart’s on fire, you must realize, smoke gets in your eyes,” Sarah sang.
David could feel the vibration of his mother’s voice through his rib cage, and he could smell her hair spray and heavy perfume, a scent he didn’t recognize. He watched the motes of dust float in and out of the soft bands of light still coming in through the windows as he placed his chin on his mother’s head and guided her slowly around the room.
Chapter 20
Selling: Essoil, 1960
JOSEPH AND ESTHER SAT in the study, desks facing each other in a permanent kiss, as they went over bills. Joseph ran the business of Essoil, but Esther had always been in charge of the domestic empire. Her feet tapped the Bean braided rug as she shuffled through the gas, the oil, the phone and electric.
Esther sighed. “What is it, Joe?” she asked him. “You look tired.”
Joseph slid his glasses down his nose and looked at his wife. “I zhink we should sell, Es,” he said. He scratched his chin and looked out the window, to the peaceful suburban street, high on a hill overlooking Casco Bay. The view had been what sold him on the place. As soon as the real estate agent had taken him onto the back deck and held her hand out to the water, he had remembered the evening he watched the sun go down with Esther all those years before. He never remembered crashing into that tree, only watching the sun set over the water, a crescent moon rising behind them. There was a tremendous silence to his life here. If he chose to, Joseph could go months without speaking to his neighbors. How unlike the crowded stoops of Brooklyn, where, even in the dead of winter, everyone was on top of one another, and rumors passed between households quick as boys snatching baseball cards and bubble gum from the candy store.
Many of the conversations between Joseph and Esther began with talk of selling the company. They had started contemplating it back when they still lived in Boston. Procter & Gamble had been hounding Joseph for years. Had they forgotten how they had berated him to sell sell, sell in those days he was on the road, his cold finger on the soft, creased map, tracing a route they’d insisted he take? He had been a disappointing salesman, fortunately, he now thought.
Esther had always encouraged the offers, believing it was the cleanser itself that was keeping her so far from Maine. I want to go home, she would tell Joseph when she was waxing the dining room table or chopping meat and carrots and potatoes and onions for the pressure cooker.
It always made him feel that their life together had been only a short vacation.
And so Joseph, who liked to be involved in all aspects of the business, had miraculously hired managers and agreed to move north without selling the company.
It wasn’t until the year after the disaster at Miriam and David’s that Joseph finally decided to sell.
“Really?” Esther asked now. She put down her stamps, rolled up in a sterling silver dispenser that had been her father’s.
“All zhe time, I’m thinking about that day, what zhe cleanser did to us all.” Joseph rubbed his shiny forehead. “I can’t believe it,” he said. “In a way, it started vith Miriam nearly killing herself from zhe chemicals. Maybe it’s a sign to end with her nearly killing us all from Essoil.”
Esther nodded. Joseph knew it thrilled her when he talked about his emotions, and he knew she was trying to remain still, as if her making any false
moves would cause him to retreat into the language of business he used all too often.
“And it would be nice to have more time for walking,” he said.
Since they had come to Maine to live permanently, Joseph had begun taking long walks alone in the forest. He spent hours identifying the local flora and fauna: This is from a maple, he’d tell Esther, twirling a crimson leaf for her upon his return home from Mackworth Island, a tiny, carless island ten minutes from their house that was home to the Governor Baxter School for the Deaf. The parking lot at the school was as far as cars could go, and often Joseph parked in the lot and walked the mile-long path that circled the island, looking out over the bay and spotting his house. Sometimes he would walk there with Miriam or Gloria when they visited. See? he’d tell his daughters. Our house, he’d say, always amazed at seeing it from this faraway perspective, wondering what Esther was doing in there without him.
Sometimes, as Joseph walked the main trail, he would see large groups of young people gesturing to one another as they tramped through the woods, silent but for the eager stomping over moss and fallen pine needles. What if no one could hear my voice? he would think as he walked over the fallen pine needles and down to the rocky shore. A world without language struck him as a pure world. It seemed terrible that who we are on the inside could never exactly match the outside. Is that what he had been trying to do all these years, make everything match up?
“Perhaps I vill learn another language,” Joseph told Esther.
She laughed. “Let’s worry about learning English first,” she said.
“I know English!” Joseph straightened in his chair.
“Of course you do, Joe,” Esther said. She reached over her desk to touch his hand. “I was only joking. Let’s learn Japanese together.” She laughed again. “Or even Italian.”
“Ve could, you know,” Joseph said. “Ve could do anything ve vant.”
“So sell, Joe,” Esther said. “I’m terribly busy—I’ve got the temple, the hospital, the museum fund-raisers—but it sure would be nice to have you around all the time.”
Esther was so agreeable to the idea that Joseph looked up from his inventory papers to see whether this was in fact the same woman who had screamed to him to “put in the storm windows already, Joe, it’s getting cold,” just that morning.
“I zhink it’s time,” he said, remembering the day he had pulled his limp daughter from the bath of chemicals. And how that night he had felt it, in his gut, known that he had made something no one had made before. But he’d had no idea what it would bring him. “I really zhink it’s time,” he said.
Joseph took an offer from Procter & Gamble that was surprisingly less lucrative than it had been when they’d begun bidding years earlier. Now, what did he care? They were just fine. And so were their children.
There were so many products now, from Mr. Clean, with its label of that bald man’s goyisha face—who would buy from a face like that? Esther asked Joseph every time she returned from the supermarket—to Pine-Sol. Even the disinfectant spray Lysol had an all-purpose cleanser. Though Joseph had been the pioneer, it didn’t much matter anymore. Had he sold earlier, perhaps they would have made many millions. Now cleansers came in lotions and sprays and creams. They had so many scents to choose from it was dizzying, thought Joseph. Procter & Gamble bought Essoil more for what it had once been than for what it now was.
But it was plenty as far as Joseph was concerned, and the irony of having come so far was not lost on him. He hated to admit it, but the offer was far more than he’d ever imagined he was worth. And when Joseph and his team of lawyers went to make the deal and sign all the paperwork, he couldn’t help but think how much the nature of selling had changed. All those years schlepping bottles from town to town, driving and driving—even now he couldn’t bear Route 9—getting down on his knees and scrubbing. Now he said, Yes, I’ll take the offer, and simply touched the firm brim of his hat. He had the men draw up the papers and deliver them to him, and simply signed his name: Joseph Brodsky. A lot easier than the scrubbing. Joseph Brodsky. When his lawyers bowed to him and gathered the papers together, stamping them here, notarizing them there, Joseph couldn’t help but think what his name had come to be worth. He thought of that man he’d met on the road all those years ago: Young man, get off the road before the sand settles permanently in your shoes, he’d said. Joseph had been able to leave before the sand had turned to stone and pinned him to the road.
The hard part was telling Frances Gold, who, the executives at Procter & Gamble insisted, did not come with the deal.
“No way, no how,” the attorney had said when Joseph had merely attempted to discuss her current contract. “It’s a deal breaker.”
Frances did have a fairly lucrative contract they would pay out, but her career as the spokeswoman for Essoil was officially terminated.
Joseph contemplated going down to New York to tell her the news in person. It is the right thing to do, he thought as he stood in the bathroom, staring into the mirror. Better than she should get a letter from a lawyer, the way he had when Solomon died. Solomon Brodsky has expired, the letter had said. At least this was what he remembered. What had it mattered, really? All Joseph had felt was a strange sensation of being frozen in time. No one could forgive anyone now; his anger was petrified. As was Solomon’s wickedness. No one can come up from behind and say, Hey, Joey, where ya been all these years? just as Joseph always secretly imagined that one day Solomon would do.
Joseph practiced what he’d tell her: Frances, he started. As he looked into the mirror to make sure his face revealed his genuine sympathy, he realized that what it revealed was bewilderment. His shiny scalp and small eyes, eyelids beginning to droop, his creased forehead, all made Joseph look baffled. He scrunched up his eyebrows to look more serious, but this only made him look as if he were acting stern.
Acting, Joseph thought, raising his head toward the mirror.
Though he had fired people before, he had never had to tell someone he had known for fifty years that she was no longer of use. She had been the face of Essoil. He looked at himself. Or had the face been his face?
His face. He had been baffled and bewildered. Coming to this country had been baffling. Living through a childhood in Brooklyn, the way his brother got away, that too had baffled Joseph. He had been baffled that Esther had finally let herself choose him, baffled by his two beautiful girls, the way his company rose in the world. How can your face express what you don’t feel? he wondered now. Things do match up in the end, he thought.
Joseph thought of Mr. Clean. An American giant, that one. It was going to have to happen anyway, Joseph knew. Frances would not have been able to sell Essoil much longer, as she was of the age when her children, had she had them, would have been grown and the cleaning should have been done by someone else. The image of Frances cleaning, Joseph thought now, would surely depress anyone.
“Frances,” he said out loud, “you have been integral to making Essoil vhat it is today.”
He shook his head. Such language. He imagined again that he would simply sign what he had to tell his old friend, the way the deaf people on the island did: You have been a jewel and I have loved you but it is over now. How, he wondered, would he say this with these chapped, thick hands? Joseph looked down at his hands and turned them over and over.
Hearing her husband speak, Esther came out of the bedroom. She padded along the hallway and peered into the open bathroom. Joseph held a hand over his heart.
“You okay?” she asked.
Joseph nodded. He saw his father in his face, Herbert Brodsky’s sinking eyes. As a boy, Joseph had thought it was disappointment that made his father look that way. Like a flounder, he had thought. Now, he realized, disappointment or success, it is simply living that does that to a face.
“Sure, Esther,” he said, walking out of the bathroom to join his wife in the hallway. “Just fine,” he said, placing his arm around her.
Turned out, the drama
of losing her Essoil contract was completely lost on Frances.
“Okeydokey,” she said when Joseph, who couldn’t bear to have her watch his face, called her one December evening.
“You’re not so upset?” Joseph looked out the window onto the street. Snow was piling up in heaps, and streetlights illuminated the falling snow and the bowing, leafless branches
“Joseph, darling,” Frances said. “I can’t believe this lasted half as long as it has.”
Joseph had been more than generous with her, but in the back of her mind she’d always wondered whether those commercials prevented her from doing other things. Or would those other parts—in the movies, plays, television—have eluded her anyway? Even a part as a character actress was hard to find. “I still can’t believe you chose me,” she said.
“Of course I chose you,” said Joseph.
But how could one tell what was a hindrance and what was the best thing that could have happened to her? Frances was always grateful that the advertisements had made her just a little famous. Still, a day didn’t go by when at the very least, someone squinted at her, trying to place her face.
“It’s fine,” she said.
“Oh.” Joseph rubbed his head. “Goot!”
Every time she spoke to him, or when he occasionally stopped by on the set to watch the production, Frances was filled with adoration and flooded with the memories of the women on her block clucking at one another with thick, cruel tongues, the sound of weeping, the sound of a broom sweeping over pavement, the smell of cabbage, the smell of saliva and peppermint, burning yahrtzeits, her father’s soothing voice, the quiet of Saturdays.
“I will see you soon, Joe,” she said.
“Okay,” he said.
“You can hang up then.” Frances laughed. A similar thing had happened after Thanksgiving at Miriam and David’s. Joseph had called a thousand times to apologize. Once she’d heard what happened, Frances had first found it hysterical and then slightly ominous. A bad omen? Perhaps. Or perhaps it foreboded her loss of the Essoil contract.
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